Re: Closer To Truth interview

--- In [email protected], David Deutsch <david.deutsch@...> wrote:
>
> On 9 May 2013, at 13:44, hibbsa <hibbsa@...> wrote:
> 
> > --- In [email protected], David Deutsch <david.deutsch@> wrote:
> >> 
> >> 
> >> On 8 May 2013, at 22:23, Steve <sonatine123@> wrote:
> >> 
> >>> Hello David
> >>> 
> >>> Thanks for this link - what an interesting website!
> >>> 
> >>> I have a question about one of your videos.  In 'Many Worlds Of Quantum Theory' you state a figure of 10 raised to 10 raised to the power of 23 as the number of histories involved when considering a cubic metre of air molecules.  How, in principle at least, is this figure derived ?
> >>> 
> >>> Incidentally I have read both of your books, and know a little about the 'Many Worlds Interpretaion' of quantum mechanics.
> >> 
> >> I can't remember the context in which I said that but it'll be something like this: 10^23 is the number of molecules in a mole (which actually occupies 22.4 litres, not a cubic metre, but never mind). If each molecule is in n different places at once, mostly uncorrelated with the others, then there are about n^(10^23) different histories under way. We can let n be 10 quite arbitrarily because with huge numbers like that, the topmost power is pretty much all that counts for purposes of envisaging it.
> >> 
> >> So it's a ballpark estimate raised to the power of a ballpark estimate raised to the power of a ballpark estimate.
> >> 
> > Why don't these histories become fungible on a higher level? 
> 
> It's because different-histories-becoming-fungibe is an interference phenomenon that requires 'fine-tuning' in the interaction. Assuming that the atoms in question start out un-entangled and with (say) approximately sharp positions and momenta and hence in approximately a single history, generic (non-fine-tuned) interactions will tend to entangle them more and more as they bounce around.
> 
> -- David Deutsch
>

Yet we do seem to have fungible worlds one level up. I'm just wondering how all these concepts might fit together slightly differently. You've already got diversity within fungibility. What's to say that isn't a scale-free phenomenon, such that the next level up is fungible, and the level below represents diversity within that fungibility? 

One benefit from that would be a mechanism for actually producing your fungible universes. I.e. the mole creates however many universes, but one level up they are all fungible, thus creating the physical material allowing abstractions to be real and dynamical things (i.e. a shedload of fungible worlds for diversification )